Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Dickens, Charles, Religion in literature'

Many Nineteenth century writers experienced the withdrawal of God discussed by Miller in The Disappearance of God. Robert Browning and Charles Dickens present two examples of "Fra Lippo Lippi" and Great Expectations model effective alternatives to accepting God's absence. Conversely "Andrea del Sarto" accepts the void the other two heroes shun.

Stalking in the nineteenth century was a dangerous, increasingly violent behavior pattern circulating in society. It was as much a criminal act then as now, and one the Victorian novel exposes as a problematic form of unwanted intrusion. The realist novel of this period alongside its more sensational counterparts not only depicts scenes of close surveillance, obsession, and harassment as harmful. It exposes the inability of social laws to regulate such conduct. I argue Charles Dickens is the most pivotal figure in observing how stalking emerged as not only a fictional motif, but as an inescapable, criminal behavior pattern. Throughout his work and its nuanced characters, Dickens reveals underlying truths about stalking and stalkers. Early books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop feature Gothic villains and predatory motifs adapted from prior literary genres. The works of his middle period foreground stalking in the context of the modern city and institutional power. In the final decade of his life, problems associated with unrequited love examine the pathological patterns of romantic obsession in modern stalker archetypes. Such an analysis and its transformative insight perceive crucial truths about unwanted intrusion, social attachment, and problem of predatory behavior.

A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.

This thesis, focusing on Dickens' early work ('Our Parish'to The Old Curiosity Shop), explorers the nature and fictional expression of the author's faith and the historical ecclesiastical elements of his writing. Dickens passionately believed that the Church was failing in its Christian responsibility to the poor. Contrary to contemporary religious thought, he neither accepted that the appalling depravation endured by the poor esulted from their personal sin, or that the imperative of spiritual redemption negated the Church's responsibility to ease their physical distress. He also realised that among his predominately London-based middle-class readership there was genuine ignorance of the reality of the suffering endured by the poor. In his early fiction Dickens used a two stage approach to communicate his personal beliefs about the poor. The first, adopted in 'Our Parish' and the first seven chapters of Oliver Twist, involved the graphic description of the suffering endured by the poor and the exposure of the inadequacies of the parochial system upon which they depended. Next, Dickens introduces his readers to a series of characters who embody his perception of Christian charity. Mr Pickwick, Mr brownlow and Charles Cheeryble (collectively referred to in this thesis as 'Charitable Angels')are, contrary to parochial officials and those who participate in charitable activity for their own selfish ends, shown to make a difference in the lives of those they assist. Dickens hoped that his readers would be inspired to emulate their actions.

As a social critic, Charles Dickens carries an attack against the mistreatment of children throughout his career. At first reacting in the defense of wronged children, he develops a view of the process of social breakdown that results from mistreating children. Adults fai3 in their duty to children because they fail to recognize the needs of children as children and even fail to recognize the human rights of children. This mistreatment is implemented by social institutions that are supposedly dedicated to caring for children. The family fails to bring up the child with love and care. The child's education rarely teaches him anything of use and often abuses him. An orphaned child, if he has no friends or relatives to take him in, may receive empty gestures of support from an institution but most often does not and is ignored or openly mistreated by society. Indeed, whether cast upon themselves or not, most of the children in Dickens have lost one or both parents, and this loss symbolizes the lack of care they receive. In his early novels, Dickens uses philanthropy to bring about happy endings, and in later works philanthropy continues to be the only alternative to the failed social institutions; however, Dickens later sees that society's failure is too great to be neatly corrected by individual philanthropy. In destroying its young citizens, society is slowly destroying itself. This study examines the breakdown of the family, education, and care for orphans in Dickens's novels Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Great Expectations.

This thesis examines Dickens's presentation of evil women. In the course of my reading I discovered that most of the evil women in his novels are mothers, or mother-figures, a finding which altered the nature of my interpretation and led to closer examination of these characters, rather than the prostitutes and criminals who may have been viewed negatively by Nineteenth century society and thereby condemned as evil. Among the many unsympathetically portrayed mothers and mother-figures in Dickens's works, the three that are most interesting are Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham, and Mrs Skewton. Madame Defarge initiates the discussion, however, as a seminal figure among the many evil women in the novels. Psychoanalytical and socio-historic readings grounded in Nineteenth century conceptions of womanhood provide background material for this thesis. Though useful and informative, however, these areas of study are not sufficient in themselves. The theory that shapes the arguments of this thesis is defined by Steven Cohan, who argues strongly that the demand for psychological coherence as a requisite of character obscures the imaginative power of character as textual construct, and who both refutes and develops character theory as it is argued by Baruch Hochman. Cohan's theory is also finally closer to that outlined by Thomas Docherty, who provides a complex reading of character as ultimately "unknowable".

This thesis discusses the relationship between money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens, concentrating mainly on the later novels, from Dombey & Son onwards. Money is extremely important in Dickens's social criticism, and he is always conscious of money-related motives in his conception of character. However, despite its importance and omnipresence, money ought not to be elevated into the key explanatory principle in Dickens's thought. Dickens has been valued for different qualities over the years. Many who value him as an entertainer with a powerful poetic imagination tend to undervalue his social criticism and moralising, and to treat those aspects as non-essential or as belonging to a different side of his life and work. On the other hand those who value him as social and moral critic have combined this with exaggerated claims of thematic coherence. This thesis suggests that we can dispense with such claims while still regarding Dickens's novels as serious contributions to the moral and social debates of his day. A close consideration will be given to most of the later novels, with the intention of placing the money themes alongside other themes, so as to emphasise the many-sidedness of Dickens's social and moral criticism. Other themes explored in the thesis include marriage and the home, and hypocrisy and self-deception. The thesis seeks to do justice to Dickens's thorough-going ambivalence towards money, and to his capacity for revisiting characters and themes from one work to another. The bias of the thesis is towards the personal and individual, but money is inevitably a social topic. Much consideration is therefore given to Dickens's fictional and non- fictional responses to contemporary social problems and attitudes, and also to material not written by Dickens but published by him in Household Words and All the Year Round.

This thesis explores the idiosyncrasies of the nineteenth-century property market and the significance of rented spaces in the literary imagination, focusing on Charles Dickens's fiction and journalism. The traditional understanding of the Victorian home has been challenged in recent criticism that points to the permeability of the public and private spheres, complicates the ways in which gender mapped onto these spheres, and highlights the difference between home and house, freehold and leasehold. This thesis contributes to the discussion by showing that domestic space was a more fractured concept than the middle-class ideal suggests. Versions of 'home' could be found in a multitude of unlikely and unstable places: in inns, hotels, lodging-houses, boarding-houses, and private houses subdivided into apartments for income. Drawing particular attention to London, I reveal tenancy - the commodification of space - to be a governing force in everyday life in the period. The vast majority of the population had an immediate economic relationship with the rooms and houses they inhabited, and this basic fact had various social, psychological and imaginative corollaries. Dickens may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of domestic ideology, but as this thesis argues, rented spaces had an enduring hold upon him. Most significantly, for Dickens, to write about tenancy meant to write about writing. His tenancy narratives touch upon questions of genre, style, character, authorial self-consciousness and the literary marketplace - especially his dialogue with the writers working around him. I explain that the emerging prominence of rented spaces gave Dickens and his circle new narrative opportunities, offering them a tool with which to study the boundaries of different genres. Space, then, does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the novel, but plays a direct part in determining which incidents take place. Accordingly, the chapters in this thesis are principally divided by genre. The introduction lays out the historical, theoretical and geographical coordinates of the argument. The first chapter identifies some of the key features of Dickens's emerging urban style, situates his early work within an influential farce tradition, and brings the figure of the landlady to life. The second discusses spatial metaphors in the Bildungsroman; it ends with an argument about the 1851 window-tax repeal and its implications for literary lodging-houses. Chapter 3 considers the sudden growth of the hospitality industry during the Great Exhibition and its corresponding narratives, from comedy to sensation fiction. This is followed by a short interlude on seaside lodgings, where Dickens and his contemporaries modernised the pastoral for the nineteenth century. After charting contemporary debates surrounding 'low' lodging-houses, Chapter 4 demonstrates how these writers used rented spaces to make major contributions to the rise of the detective story. The fifth chapter, on living alone and living together, is largely dedicated to the multi-authored Christmas numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round; these witty collections suggest that the dynamics of the lodging-house reflect the politics of Dickens's immediate circle. Finally, a coda contemplates the legacy of Dickens's tenancy narratives in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

This thesis examines the early reception of Charles Dickens in China from 1895 to 1915, with the aim of exploring the extent to which the values and politics that are purportedly embedded in Dickensian texts were interpreted and re-rendered for a totally different readership in a new place and time. I shall first introduce the publication and circulation history of Dickens's works in China during this first phase of cross-cultural transfer, and outline the theoretical underpinning of my research by arguing that the early Chinese translation of Dickens's works was a distinctive form both of translation and of adaptation, and one which was conditioned by specific cultural and historic contexts. I shall then focus on three main case studies-the Chinese translations and adaptations of Little Dorrit (1855-57), David Copperfield (1849-50) and A Tale a/Two Cities (1859)-to explore how different Dickensian features were re-enacted, or in cases subverted, during this crosscultural encounter. In Chapter One, I shall examine how Dickens's use of space and place in Little Dorrit is adapted and transformed by the Chinese translators, to the extent that the labyrinthine cityscape that characterised the author's portrayal of London is replaced by a gridlike structure that embodies traditional Chinese architectural principles. I shall also investigate how the social value and ideology as inscribed in built structures in Victorian England was transformed, and undermined during this adaptive process. In Chapter Two, I argue that traditional Chinese life writing, which was often used to exemplify wider history and culture instead of articulating the 'difference' of a bourgeois subject found in Western autobiographical traditions, has influenced the translation and adaptation of David Copperfield. I shall demonstrate the importance of examining these different traditions, and their impact on the way the text was adapted, against the two cultures' different conceptions of the self and of the individual at their respective historic moments. In Chapter Three, I shall first consider how in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens makes use of the French Revolution, and the antithesis between the individual and the collective, to comment on contemporary politics before proceeding to consider how the novel was adapted to serve specific political purposes when it was first published in China in an overtly political journal, The Justice, about a year and a half after the Chinese Revolution of 1911. I shall demonstrate the importance of reading the text in its original print contexts, and consider how the changes which the Chinese translator introduced to both the main text and the paratexts have transformed the politics of Dickens's original narrative. The influence of Chinese traditional historical writing on the adaptive text will also be explored. I shall conclude this thesis by situating it within the wider contexts of Victorian studies, arguing that my emphasis on cultural specificities and historical contingency challenges some of the methodologies and underlying assumptions pertaining to the 'global' turn of Dickens studies.

Cette thèse examine des trajectoires imaginaires décrites dans l’œuvre de Charles Dickens et à partir d’elle. On y étudie le texte et les réincarnations de Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) puis The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), trois romans qui, depuis l’ère victorienne, pénètrent l’imaginaire collectif et alimentent des discours divers, toujours influencés par leurs conditions de production. Ainsi, cette thèse pratique des microanalyses de ses sources primaires tout en prêtant attention au contexte de chaque œuvre. Son corpus comprend des adaptations filmiques mais aussi des reprises plus indirectes, telles que des réécritures, séries télévisées ou jeux vidéo faisant apparaître des éléments identifiables comme « dickensiens ». Cet adjectif qualifie des objets imaginaires et des phénomènes culturels dont on s’attache ici à préciser la nature. En particulier, le dickensien et ses persistances sont étudiées au prisme de l’excentricité, un terme souvent utilisé pour évoquer la qualité truculente et insolite des écrits de Dickens. Mais ici, la définition de cette notion est approfondie : l’excentrique, toujours situé entre un centre et ses marges, sert à penser les ambivalences du dickensien. Au gré des contextes socio-culturels et esthétiques dans lesquels il s’incarne, l’imaginaire créé par Dickens nourrit des discours tantôt normatifs et maîtrisables, tantôt subversifs et déroutants. La cartographie chaotique dressée dans ce travail aboutit à une réflexion méthodologique : les persistances du dickensien forment des trajectoires discontinues et imprévisibles, qui contrarient les classements bibliographiques, périodisations et barrières disciplinaires
This thesis looks at the text and afterlives of Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), by Charles Dickens. Ever since the Victorian era, these three novels have penetrated our collective imagination and have fed into various kinds of discourses, which are always determined by their conditions of production and reception. Thus, this thesis both performs microanalyses of its primary sources and explores the context in which each work was published. Its corpus includes filmic adaptations as well as more indirect reincarnations, such as rewritings, TV series and videogames featuring elements identifiable as ‘Dickensian’. The latter adjective points to a variety of fictional objects and cultural processes, which are gradually circumscribed throughout this thesis. In particular, the Dickensian and its afterlives are defined in connection with the ‘eccentric’, a term often used to conjure up the colourful and sometimes queer quality of Dickens’s texts. Here, however, a broader definition of this notion is adopted: the eccentric, which always stands halfway between a centre and its margins, is used to examine the many ambiguities of the Dickensian. For, as they move into new aesthetic and socio-cultural contexts, the fictions created by Dickens feed into discourses which can be normative and/or subversive, stereotyped and/or disturbing. My cartography of Dickensian afterlives gradually appears as chaotic, which eventually leads me to reconsider some of my methodological assumptions: Dickens’s fictions move in irregular and unpredictable ways, which often upset bibliographical, periodical and disciplinary boundaries

This dissertation attempts to trace hereditary motifs in the novels of Charles Dickens and to relate these motifs to broader concerns--specifically Dickens's depiction of the formation of the self, his understanding of history and of the role of time Towards this end, I offer an historical overview of scientific and popular thinking on heredity, and suggest how some of these notions were translated into Dickens's fiction. The discussion of hereditary themes in the novels falls into two broad categories--the private and the public.
In the first of these, I argue that Dickens tended to define positive moral qualities, such as goodness, as hereditable. At the same time, he was reluctant to portray negative characteristics, such as criminality or insanity as being amenable to hereditary transmission. This assumption of a moral basis to heredity had ramifications for Dickens's understanding of human nature which, in turn spill over into his depiction of the broader public issues associated with heredity--its relationship to class, to race, and to history.
The very last section of the thesis focuses on the Darwinian revolution. There I argue that Dickens's attitude towards the importance of hereditary endowment changed after the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. I suggest that Darwin's book prompted Dickens to rethink his earlier deterministic approach to the problem of human identity. After 1859, Dickens jettisons heredity entirely as a factor in the formation of the self and replaces it with environment and experience. The last novels displace the Dickensian metaphors of hidden kinship and universal connection--both of which are related to heredity--and put in their place, the thematics of dispersal and disintegration.

This thesis is an examination of the double motif used by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. There is a subtle shift that takes place in these last completed works, from a double motif which is used to prescribe individual behaviour along the lines of domestic or Christian ideology, to one which examines the social and psychological consequences of the individual's submission to such ideological imperatives. In fine, Dickens begins to distance himself from the stock, physical double he had inherited, turning instead to a double that finds its causes and ramifications firmly located in both the social and psychological spheres. This increasing complexity of the double motif is indicative of Dickens' gradually more sophisticated, less stereotypical view of the relationship between the individual and society than that suggested by his famous caricatures or his previous works.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Sydney, 2000.
Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 21, 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts to the Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts. Degree awarded 2000; thesis submitted 1999. Includes bibliography. Also available in print form.

This dissertation investigates through a close reading of four novels--The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations--the way in which masculinity and authorial subjectivity in Dickens's novels are bound to the figure of the circle, an image which functions both as a figure for an ideal narcissistic unity and as a sign of the individual's subjection to the metaphoric and metonymic movement of language within the symbolic order; what Jacques Lacan has identified as "symbolic necessity." I demonstrate this double function of the circle by showing how orality in Dickens's work belongs to a chain of images that include pretty lips, rings, necklaces, fur ringed boots, as well as the grinding wheels and gears of the legal system. As Dickens's career progresses, the novels become more and more haunted by the sense that the magic circle of personal fantasy is inhabited by the violent, whirling motion of the law and language. My argument culminates in readings of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations which show how male masochism in Dickens's novels is not so much a negation of paternal power and privilege as it is a consequence of the latter's introjection within the subject as fantasy, a fantasy in which the subject is fastened, as in Pip's fever dream, to "a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf."

Food has a near-ubiquitous role in the fiction of Charles Dickens. From the action that does and does not take place, to the appearance and essence of the characters, and to the language and style in which they were written, virtually every aspect of Dickens's novels and short stories is, to some extent and at one time or another, connected with food. This thesis explores the nature and implications of food in Dickens and, in addition to its introduction and conclusion, it has been divided into three chapters: (a) Language, Style, and Subject/theme; (b) Plot and Setting; and (c) Characterization. As well, the parallel between food's omni-presence in Dickens's fiction and its centrality in the so-called 'real world' has meant that the literary concept 'realism' is a recurrent concern.

The legal system of Victorian England is integral to Charles Dickens' novels and to their moral intent. Dickens was acutely conscious of the way in which the Victorian novel operated as a form of moral art. As a novelist he is concerned about the victims of his society and the way in which their lots can be improved. He therefore chooses to construct representative victims of legal institutions such as the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Court of Chancery in his novels to highlight flaws in his world and the changes that might be made to improve social conditions. This thesis will examine the way in which Dickens' fictional enquiry into the social world his characters stand to inherit is focused on the legal system and its institutions, most particularly, the law of succession. By discussing three novels from different periods of his writing career, Oliver Twist (1837), Bleak House (1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1862-1865), I will suggest how his engineering of moral outcomes shows his development as a writer. The law of succession and related legal institutions such as the Court of Chancery, dealing with wills and inheritance, recurs in Dickens' novels, providing the novelist with social, moral and legal identities for his characters. These identities, as unveiled during the texts, propel the characters and plot development in particular directions in response to the novels' moral intent. The role of inheritance in Victorian society largely provides Dickens with a means to explore the adequacies of existing legal institutions, such as the means by which to prove and execute wills and the operation of the Court of Chancery. The role of inheritance also allows Dickens to examine the social condition of those who are deprived of an inheritance or who are unable to enforce their legal rights. In this respect Dickens concentrates on the appalling conditions of institutions such as workhouses and poorhouses in Victorian society and on resultant criminal activity and prostitution in the community as the disinherited struggle to survive. Dickens' study of crime in particular sheds invaluable light on the prevailing moral standards of, and difficulties with, his society. Dickens acknowledges his pedagogical role as an author, providing synopses of his lessons in the prefaces to his books and forewarning his audience of the literary devices (such as grotesquerie) that are necessary to communicate them effectively. This thesis will examine the way in which Dickens' engineering of moral outcomes through the convenient use of the law of succession becomes increasingly sophisticated as he develops as a writer. The stock plot device of the impoverished orphan child, a representative victim of such a Victorian legal institution as the Poor Laws who is morally saved when elevated into gentility by a secret inheritance, sustains the plot of Oliver Twist. The simplistic and somewhat improbable fortunes of Oliver, however, give way to the more probable moral and legal outcomes of characters such as Jo and Richard Carstone in Bleak House. In Bleak House Carstone, who is certainly a more interesting central protagonist than Esther Summerson in terms of Dickens' examination of legal institutions and their effect on moral and social outcomes in the novel, makes a ruinous attempt to manipulate the legal system and gain control over his fortune by joining the suit of Jarndyce v Jarndyce. In Our Mutual Friend, however, a complex and successful manipulation of the legal system is achieved by Harmon/Handford/Rokesmith, an adult and extremely resourceful character who, in conjunction with other characters such as Bella Wilfer and Mr Boffin, is testament to the inseparability of individual and legal identities as far as moral and social outcomes are concerned. Throughout the novels it can be seen that the abilities of Oliver Twist, Richard Carstone and John Rokesmith to manipulate the law of succession correlate directly to stages of Dickens' maturity as a writer and his increasing confidence about layering texts and developing more complex and sophisticated structures in his novels. Dickens' focus on the role of inheritance, however, entails the development of perspectives on the legal system in entirety. Oliver Twist as a novel drawing upon the traditions of sensation, and turning on events such as 'legacies, birthrights, thefts and deeds of violence', focuses intensely on the criminal justice system and establishes Dickens' famous attraction to repulsion and use of grotesquerie and popular entertainment. Oliver Twist also develops analogies between law and drama, establishing the foundation from which Dickens can employ legal metaphors to great effect in his quest for reforms of the legal system and society at large in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Oliver Twist further establishes the milieu of a stratified society in which finances govern social behaviour and in which the class system is reflected in the legal system through the denial of access to justice to those who are unable to afford it, or suffer gender inequality. Bleak House builds upon the problems outlined in Oliver Twist. It explores the criminal system, particularly the defeminisation of the law and access to justice issues, including the problem of delay in litigation. Specific legal institutions such as the jury system and, most notably, the civil branch of the Victorian legal system with a particular focus on the equitable procedures in the Court of Chancery are examined. Jo is a transmutation of Oliver as representative victim of the Poor Laws, and his fate as such appears more probable. Richard Carstone is, however, the central character in the novel in terms of his construction as the representative victim of the civil system and of the law of succession. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens refines his use of the law of succession and other legal institutions to propel characters into directions suited to his own agendas. The entire plot is constructed from the premise of the execution of a will arising out of the death of John Harmon whose murder is a crime that has never, in fact, been committed. The ramifications of the execution of this will and subsequent codicils are extremely interesting. The novel further examines problems of access to justice and gender inequality under the prevailing legal system, particularly through Bella Wilfer. As part of the development of Dickens' use of the legal system there is a perceptible development of his powers of characterisation. Richard Carstone is a more substantial and believable character than Oliver; John Harmon offers the opportunity for Dickens to experiment with a chameleon identity. This aspect of Dickens' development, however, has received substantial attention already, particularly by Arnold Kettle, Barbara Hardy, Monroe Engel and Grahame Smith. There has been, to the best of my knowledge, little work done on his use of the law of succession, and it is here that I wish to concentrate my argument. Much of Dickens' interest in the law appears to stem from his early career as a legal clerk in Lincoln's Inn and Doctors' Commons. His first job, as a writing clerk in the office of Ellis and Blackmore, a small set of chambers in Holborn Court, involved duties such as copying documents, administering the registration of wills and running errands to other legal offices and law courts. Public offices with which Dickens came into contact in the course of this job were the Alienation Office, the Sixpenny Receivers Office, the Prothonotaries Office, the Clerk of the Escheats, the Dispensation Office, the Affidavit Office, the Filazer's, Exigenter's and Clerk of the Outlawry's Office, the Hanaper Office and the Six-Clerk's office . This employment gave Dickens an exposure to a wide range of jurisdictions and legal precedents. Through this contact with a variety of legal practices, Dickens experienced a broad range of litigation which enabled him to develop opinions on the contemporary operation of the law and its efficacy in the administration of justice. Such experience almost certainly sowed the seeds for much of the critique of the legal system found in his novels. In 1829 when he joined Doctors Commons, Dickens was exposed to ecclesiastical and naval jurisdictions including a Consistory Court, A Court of Arches, the Prerogative Court, the Delegates Court and the Admiralty Court. In this role Dickens was employed by a firm of proctors to take notes on evidence and judgments. This job as a shorthand reporter granted Dickens the opportunity to observe at close range members of the legal profession such as clerks, proctors, secretaries and Doctors. Probably as much through a process of osmosis as anything else, Dickens gained an understanding of the mechanics of basic legal procedures through this type of employment. In order to work as a court reporter, Dickens was required to use shorthand, a method of taking notes that perhaps allowed Dickens to develop the skill to think and write quickly. It was probably at this early stage in his career that the duality of law and literature began to come together for Dickens, developing at a later stage into his volumes of legal fiction. The anonymity of the law writer's existence, as captured later in Dickens' description of Nemo the law-writer in Bleak House, who either lived or did not live by law-writing according to Krook, also may have prompted Dickens to begin writing original works with legal themes.

Oliver Twist is a novel loved by many, read by more. It is a classic novel by Charles Dickens, portraying the life and hardships of a young boy named Oliver Twist, who was born in a work house. Oliver is bright and righteous, the exact opposite of his brother Edward “Monks” Leeford. This essay will follow Oliver and Monks and analyse their characters in the light of the literary hero and the literary villain and in doing so see how Dickens use the characters as literary tools to convey his view of a dark, uncaring Victorian society as well as his hopes for a brighter future. Their strong characteristics make way for a fascinating story, a story that do not only tell us about Oliver’s bravery and Monks’ egoism, but one that do also prove that they are characters created by Dickens to show both the Victorian society that he lived in as well as the society that it could become.

Charles Dickens é um autor cujos méritos literários são, muitas vezes, obscurecidos por sua enorme popularidade, sendo seus livros relegados por muitos à categoria de mero entretenimento. O propósito deste trabalho é analisar na forma do romance como - apesar de temas e estilo que se apresentam como populares - o texto de Hard Times pode revelar um interessante e profundo diálogo entre literatura e sociedade. Sentimentalismo e melodrama são estudados como formas tipicamente dickensianas de representação dos conflitos e transformações sociais que afetaram o século XIX.
Charles Dickens has sometimes had his literary qualities darkened by his enormous popularity, and his books have been considered by many critics as nothing but entertainment. The objective of this work is to analyse how the form of the novel - in spite of its popular style and theme- promotes in Hard Times an interesting and profound dialogue between literature and society. Sentimentalism and melodrama are studied as typically Dickensian forms of representation of social changes and conflicts in the 19th Century.

This thesis examines Dickens's uses of images of the river throughout his fiction, and also in the early sketches, the reprinted pieces from Household Words and The Uncommercial Traveller. The river concerned is usually but not exclusively the Thames, usually but not exclusively in London. The thesis offers some practical evidence to account for the powerful influence of the Thames upon Dickens's imagination and shows how he conceives of it both within existing frames of reference and in some distinctively Dickensian ways. It considers how Dickens's representations of the river play into the cult of the picturesque which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, and into the tradition which sees it as a symbolic conduit of the empire. It goes on to consider his use of the river as a boundary, the consequent importance of river crossings in his work, and his conception of the riparian space as a liminal one. It then explores a distinctive scheme of discourse which uses the river to represent rebellious forces beyond the control of human agency and shows how this reflects the sense of spiritual threat which is to be found in some of the other, albeit rare, depictions of nature to be found in his writing. It then shows how Dickens uses the river symbolically to express ideas about death and rebirth, together with the loss of and changes in identity, and how he draws on a scheme of distinctively Christian iconography to do so. Finally it shows how he uses it to create and represent an underworld for London, using tropes of epic founded on classical models. The thesis concludes that, in its use of natural forces to signify social ones, Dickens's writing about the river serves to amplify his conception of stratification in Victorian society and adds weight to the socially conservative political stance which is known to be present in his world view.

This bachelor thesis will have its focus on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The central claim of this thesis is that in the novel Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip is used by Dickens as a metaphor for the British urbanization during the period of industrialisation.       The literary theory that will help to analyse and prove this claim will be New Historicism. The central praxis of using non-literary historical documents and comparing them it to a literary text such as Great Expectations will be used in the discussion part of this thesis. As New Historicism tends to be unclearly defined, this thesis applies H.Aram Veeser’s definition and his definition is explained in this thesis.      The thesis is structured thus firstly, Pip’s time in the marshes will be discussed and in this discussion and the following ones. Characters that influence Pip is used to see Pip’s alternation.Secondly, after discussing Pip’s time in the marshes, his time in London is discussed. Finally, Pip’s return to the marshes after living in the city is discussed to clearly see his change in attitude and whether the urbanisation is for the better or it worsens his state of mind. Pip’s journey in Great Expectations expresses an ambivalence against urbanization. As urbanisation has great expectations in the rural communities, Pip sees that this comes to a high cost.

Les études qui entreprennent d’évaluer la place de la maladie dans les romans de Dickens et Collins adoptent souvent le point de vue du médecin, montrant comment leurs peintures de la maladie constituent des diagnostics scientifiquement exacts. Or la médecine est d’abord un discours sur la maladie : diagnostiquer les personnages des romanciers reviendrait donc à considérer la grille de lecture médicale comme outil d’analyse valable pour évaluer la maladie dans leur œuvre. Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la pertinence d’une telle grille de lecture, qui semble anachronique [ce discours se construit tout au long du XIXe siècle, il n’est donc pas constitué au moment où les deux romanciers écrivent]. Il s’agit de comprendre comment le discours médical s’est imposé au fil du XIXe siècle : pour dire et écrire la maladie, la médecine s’est inspirée d’autres types de discours, et en premier lieu celui du roman, qu’elle a utilisé pour tenter de prendre place dans les esprits victoriens. Après avoir établi les conditions dans lesquelles est né ce nouveau discours normatif, cette thèse analyse la relation de Dickens et Collins avec ce discours. Conscients que les médecins tentent de passer d’un art à une science positive, les deux romanciers semblent se méfier des nouvelles catégories nosographiques et méthodes cliniques. Nous sommes alors fondés à lire leurs romans non plus seulement comme des documents qui questionnent la pathologie scientifique, mais aussi comme des prismes d’autres imaginaires du corps malade. L’étude de leur œuvre dévoile ainsi les soubassements imaginaires de la nouvelle médecine, mais aussi l’esthétique du morbide propre à chacun des deux auteurs
Studies concentrating on the value of disease in novels by Collins or Dickens often adopt a medical point of view, showing that the novelists depict illness with the eyes of trained clinicians, offering surprisingly precise case studies and diagnoses. This approach sheds light on some episodes; yet, the “medico-realists” seem to overlook that by viewing literature through a medical prism, they are using the tools and rationale of a constructed discourse. Pathology, which is the science that studies the disease and not the disease itself, was created all long the 19th century. Viewing the novelists’ treatment of disease only through the filter of pathology gives a reductive image of the way they understand morbidity. This research aims at deconstructing the medical discourse, and at showing how, to take up Dickens’s words, “for theories, as for organised beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life”, which str! uggle scientific medicine has apparently won. Doctors have used other types of discourse to create their own, and in so doing, novels have been a great source of inspiration. After positing that medicine creates a myth of positivism, this study goes on to analyse the way Dickens and Collins considered the rise of this new field. Unlike what medico-realists seem to take for granted, the novelists did not subscribe to the new medical methods and even denied understanding disease according to pathological categories. Their use of diseases unexpectedly unveils the way doctors wrote and imagined disease. Studying Dickens’s and Collins’s ways of conceiving pathology offers insight into the imaginary origins of a burgeoning science

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt
This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English

Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer
This dissertation considers England's imperial rivalry with France and its influence on literary production in the long nineteenth century. It offers a new context for the study of British imperialism by examining the ways in which mid-Victorian novels responded to and were shaped by the threat of French imperialism. It studies three canonical Victorian novels: William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1846-1848), Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and argues that even though these texts deal very lightly with the British colonies and feature very few colonial figures, they are still very much "about empire" because they are informed by British anxieties regarding French imperialism. Revolutionary Narratives links each novel to a contemporary political crisis between England and France, and it argues that each novelist turns back to the Revolutionary period in response to and as a means to process a modern threat from France. This project also explains why Thackeray, Brontë and Dickens would return specifically to Revolutionary history in response to a French imperial threat. Its first chapter traces the ways in which "Revolutionary narratives," stories about how the 1789 French Revolution had changed the world, came to inform and to lend urgency to England and France's global, imperial rivalry through their deployment in abolitionist writings in both countries. Abolitionist tracts helped to fuse an association between "empire" and "Revolution" in the Romantic period, and recognizing this helps us to understand why Victorian writers would use Revolutionary narratives in response to imperial crisis. However, this dissertation ultimately asserts that Vanity Fair, Villette and A Tale of Two Cities revive Revolutionary history in order to write against it and to lament its primacy in popular discourse. In the mid nineteenth century, public discussion in England and France tended to return quickly to the history of the Revolutionary period in order to contextualize new political drama between the two countries. This meant that history often seemed to be repeating itself when it came to England and France's rivalry. Thackeray, Brontë and Dickens use Revolutionary history in their novels as a way to react against this popular use of history and in an effort to imagine a new path forward for England and France, one not burdened by the weight of the past
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English

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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)
O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a categoria da espacialidade e o procedimento grotesco nos romances Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) de Victor Hugo e A tale of two cities (1859) de Charles Dickens, mostrando como esses procedimentos narrativos auxiliam na projeção das ações das personagens e como produzem efeito de sentido, revelando assim uma das infinitas leituras oferecidas pelas referidas obras. Em Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo revela a miséria humana por meio da marca dos sentimentos opostos que habitam no homem; as contradições desses sentimentos existentes uma ao lado da outra, e não no predomínio de uma sobre a outra. Os espaços da narrativa hugoana são configurações de um novo tempo-espaço marcado pela modernidade da época, e representam uma extensão dos personagens desse romance. Em A tale of two cities (1859), Charles Dickens expressa a miséria que permeia as cidades em crise diante da mesma modernidade, evidenciando que a fome, a ausência de liberdade e de condições de vida adequadas para se viver na urbe moderna transformam o homem em um ser irracional e insensível
This study aims to analyse the spatiality category and the grotesque procedure in the novels Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) written by Victor Hugo and A tale of two cities (1859) written by Charles Dickens, the intention is to show how these narrative procedures help in the projection of the characters actions and how they can produce meaning effect, thereby revealing infinite readings which are offered by the referred works. In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo reveals the human misery through the opposite feelings which inhabit the human mind; the contradictions of those feelings exist one alongside another and not on the dominance of one over the other. The spaces in Hugo’s narrative are configurations of a new time-space defined by the modernity era, and they represent an extension of the characters in this novel. In A tale of two cities (1859), Charles Dickens expresses the misery that permeates the cities facing crisis in the same modernity, emphasizing that hunger, the lack of freedom and the appropriate living conditions in order to inhabit the modern metropolis transform man into an irrational and insensitive human being

The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific evidence that was acquired from his five-year voyage, it is clear that Dawinian nature is reflected in cruel Victorian capitalism. Three novels of Charles Dickens which were published around 1859, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend, share Darwinian aspects in their fictional worlds. In Bleak House, the central image, the Court of Chancery as the background of the novel, resembles Darwinian nature which is anti-Platonic in essence. The characters in Hard Times are divided into two groups: the winners and the losers in the arena of survival. The winners survive in Coketown, and the losers disappear from the city. The rules controlling the fates of Coketown people are the same as the rules of Darwinian nature. Our Mutual Friend can be interpreted as a matter of money. In the novel, everything is connected with money, and the relationship among people is predation to get money. Money is the central metaphor of the novel and around the money, the characters kill and are killed like the nature of Darwin in which animals kill each other. When a dominant ideology of a particular period permeates ingredients of the society, nobody can escape the controlling power of the ideology. Darwin and Dickens, although they worked in different areas, give evidence that their works are products of the ethos of Victorian England.

Orientador: Sidney Barbosa
Banca: Henrique Silvestre Soares
Banca: Fabiano Rodrigo da Silva Santos
Banca: Antônio Fernandes Júnior
Banca: Andressa Cristina de Oliveira
Resumo: O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a categoria da espacialidade e o procedimento grotesco nos romances Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) de Victor Hugo e A tale of two cities (1859) de Charles Dickens, mostrando como esses procedimentos narrativos auxiliam na projeção das ações das personagens e como produzem efeito de sentido, revelando assim uma das infinitas leituras oferecidas pelas referidas obras. Em Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo revela a miséria humana por meio da marca dos sentimentos opostos que habitam no homem; as contradições desses sentimentos existentes uma ao lado da outra, e não no predomínio de uma sobre a outra. Os espaços da narrativa hugoana são configurações de um novo tempo-espaço marcado pela modernidade da época, e representam uma extensão dos personagens desse romance. Em A tale of two cities (1859), Charles Dickens expressa a miséria que permeia as cidades em crise diante da mesma modernidade, evidenciando que a fome, a ausência de liberdade e de condições de vida adequadas para se viver na urbe moderna transformam o homem em um ser irracional e insensível
Abstract: This study aims to analyse the spatiality category and the grotesque procedure in the novels Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) written by Victor Hugo and A tale of two cities (1859) written by Charles Dickens, the intention is to show how these narrative procedures help in the projection of the characters actions and how they can produce meaning effect, thereby revealing infinite readings which are offered by the referred works. In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo reveals the human misery through the opposite feelings which inhabit the human mind; the contradictions of those feelings exist one alongside another and not on the dominance of one over the other. The spaces in Hugo's narrative are configurations of a new time-space defined by the modernity era, and they represent an extension of the characters in this novel. In A tale of two cities (1859), Charles Dickens expresses the misery that permeates the cities facing crisis in the same modernity, emphasizing that hunger, the lack of freedom and the appropriate living conditions in order to inhabit the modern metropolis transform man into an irrational and insensitive human being
Doutor

"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these authors relies on the fantastic in order to reach the kinds of meaning nineteenth-century realism strives for. My critical framework is derived from the two interrelated discourses of sacred space theology and cultural geography, focusing primarily on the terms topos and chora which I figure as parallel to realism and fantasy. These terms, gleaned from Aristotle and Plato, function to express two interweaving concepts of space that together construct our sense of place. Topos, as defined by Belden C. Lane, refers to "a mere location, a measurable, quantifiable point, neutral and indifferent" whereas chora refers to place as "an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives." In the narratives I examine, meaning is constructed via the fantastic interpretations (chora) of realistically portrayed events (topos). The writers I engage with use this dynamic to strategically address pressing epistemological concerns relating to the purpose of art and its relationship to truth. My dissertation examines the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Pater, and Wilde through the lens of this conceptual framework, focusing on how the language that each of these writers uses overlays chora on top of topos. In essence each of these writers uses imaginative language to transfigure the worlds they describe for specific purposes. For Dickens these fantastic hermeneutics allow him to transfigure world into one where the "familiar" becomes "romantic," where moral connections are clear, and which encourages the moral imagination necessary for empathy to take root. Charlotte and Emily Brontës's transfigurations highlight the subjectivity inherent in representation. For Pater, that transfigured world is aesthetic experience and the way our understanding of the "actual world" of topos is shaped by it. Oscar Wilde's transfigured world is by far the most radical, for in the end that transfigured world ceases to be artificial, as Wilde disrupts the separation between reality and artifice. "Of That Transfigured World" argues for a closer understanding of the hermeneutic and epistemological workings of several major British authors. My dissertation offers a paradigm through which to view these writers that connects them to the on-going Victorian discourses of realism while also pointing to the critical sophistication of their positions in seeking to relate truth to art. My identification of the tensions between what I term topos and chora in these works illuminates the relationship between the creation of meaning and the hermeneutics used to direct the reader to that particular meaning. It further points to the important, yet sometimes troubling, role that imagination plays in the epistemologies at the center of that crowning Victorian achievement, the Realist novel.